


Left Behind

by marryingthebed



Series: left behind [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Everyone is in awe of Peggy Carter, F/M, M/M, Pining, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:38:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3249980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marryingthebed/pseuds/marryingthebed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy rescues Bucky, and the two of them have to deal with the consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah hi so I have been sick for three days, and in that time I have finally finished this. It sounds like a Peggy/Bucky fic, but it isn't, I swear. A more accurate description would be that it's a Peggy-and-Bucky-being-bitter-BFFs fic.

“You loved him, didn’t you?” She pauses, seems to realize that this particular moment is happening far too soon. “I-i understand. Perhaps not--”

“You don’t. I didn’t and you don’t,” he says, and for a long time, that’s that.

**

The second rescue of James Buchanan Barnes from a HYDRA facility is not nearly as dramatic as the first. Like before, he is strapped to a table. Like before, the first thing he sees once free is a familiar face. 

“Carter,” he says, and she nods briskly. In his memories, everything she does is brisk. There is no time for her to be anything else. 

“Can you repeat your name, rank, and serial for me?” she asks, and he rattles it off twice before they start moving. 

It’s difficult--the last time he was walking, he’d had two arms. Peggy is strong, but he’s heavy, and thrice the two of them nearly topple over. It all comes to a stop when Bucky catches sight of a small, bespectacled man amidst the chaos. 

“Z-zola,” he whispers to Peggy. Maybe there’s more he wants to say, but it doesn’t matter: she lifts her right hand away from him and shoots Arnim Zola twice in the chest. It is both a freeing and a terrifying thing to witness. 

Unlike before, they don’t have to walk much further. Stark’s waiting outside the facility, in one of those beautiful new planes of his. Bucky stumbles on, catches sight of Stark’s twitchy little mustache, and passes out. The last thought he can remember having is that Peggy Carter is a helluva woman.

**

When he wakes up she says “You didn’t ask why Steve wasn’t there.”

It hurts. Oh god oh god oh god it hurts, like that one time he put his whole damn hand on the stove by accident when he was thirteen, just had to sit there while his skin _screamed_.

“No,” he says, “I didn’t.”

Peggy nods. “Did they tell you how it happened?”

“Yeah, but I-i don’t trust…” He doesn’t trust Zola, his lips like dried-out worms, leering at Bucky. _Your beloved captain is dead, my soldier. Whatever will you do?_

Peggy explains. It is short and magnificently brutal in its simplicity. Steve choked on his own goodness. Steve drowned, or maybe he froze (which happens first?). Steve is so damn dead that Stark can’t even find his body. 

“Do you want to know what his last words were?”  


“No,” Bucky says, “I wanna die.” 

**

In some ways, Bucky has spent his entire life preparing to mourn Steve Rogers. They’d been sixteen, halfway through winter and on the verge of calling down the local priest when Bucky’d thought _No, it can’t be this. This, this isn’t the thing that kills him._

And then Steve had appeared above him, dirty and haloed like the most honest kind of angel. Too big and too handsome in that damn uniform. And Bucky’d thought _Oh_.  

It’s something he confesses to Peggy months later, when they’re cold and tired and half-dead. “I thought I’d go first.” 

“I thought I would too,” she whispers back, and maybe there are tears in her eyes. 

Bucky sucks in a breath, thinks of who he used to be, all lightness and love and aching, and says “Maybe we did.” 

But after he wakes up, after he speaks of his need for death not like an abstraction, but a goal, he can’t talk to her. Bucky mourns Steve while curled up alone in a tent somewhere in Europe (location: classified), snot dripping out of his nose and pooling above his lip, mixing with his tears. 

Death is not pretty, he knows. Doesn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise. On Steve, death is probably even harsher. Bright blue eyes cold, frosted over. Quick, smiling mouth gone. The body that Bucky could never think of as truly his, wasted.  

Maybe it was all a waste.

Agent Carter gives him a respectable amount of time to mope. More than that, even. He has been in bed for seven days when she reappears at his side. 

“What now?” he asks, hopes she ignores the rasp in his throat.

“Now, Sergeant Barnes, we go to work.”

**

They fly back to the States in a plane that Howard Stark did not design. Bucky wonders how Peggy manages to always look so good, when he looks like shit turned over. 

“Where d’you get the lipstick?” he asks her.

“You’ve never taken a girl out shopping for cosmetics?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Couldn’t afford it, I guess. But I mean where do _you_ get it? Ain’t no department stores in a war zone.”  


“My mother sends it to me. If there’s anything she believes in, it’s that a woman should never leave the house without her face on.” 

Bucky laughs. “What, they don’t have God in England?”  


Peggy laughs too, but in a different way. “They do. My mother’s just never had any interest in Him.”

“And you?”  


“I don’t have the time to think about God, Sergeant Barnes. Not when I have to put my face on every morning.” 

Bucky considers that. Back home, God had been too heavy of a weight on him, sitting on his chest and laughing while he watched Steve go to church, his mother go to temple. 

“I prayed to Steve during the war,” he says. “At least, I’d write him letters in my head.”  


_Dear Stevie please let me get out of this pleasepleaseplease_

_Steve it’s so cold_

_Steve as long as you’re safe I’ll be fine, just keep breathing for me Stevie, please, as long as you’re breathing I don’t give a damn about what happens--_

The blasphemy of his confession doesn’t shock Peggy; Bucky hadn’t expected it to. “It worked, didn’t it? He saved you.”

“Fat lot of good that did him.” If Bucky hadn’t--he imagines Steve still a choir boy, punching some actor with a fake mustache and smiling for the cameras. Steve, bored out of his skull but still beautifully alive. 

Peggy rolls her eyes. “Oh, bloody--you know he blamed himself, when you fell? The two of you, honestly! It wasn’t his fault that you fell and it isn’t your fault that he’s--that he’s gone. He would’ve fought anyway. You were just the catalyst for it.” 

“Lucky me. So you don’t blame yourself, either?”

“I didn’t say that.” 

“Oh, so it’s a pot-and-kettle situation here, is it? Tell me, Agent, did he swear to take HYDRA down because of your tragic death, too?”

Peggy bites her lip, ends up with a smudge of red on her teeth. The perils of following your mother’s advice, Bucky supposes. “I let him do it,” she says. 

“So maybe it’s both our faults.”

“It’s the way things are supposed to be. That’s what my mother’d say, at least. That we have to--we have to carry on.” She’s got her eyes trained on the ceiling, which Bucky knows from experience is a tried-and-true way to keep the tears from falling. 

“Well, no offense to Mrs. Carter, but that’s bullshit. What’s next, you gonna tell me that Steve’s ‘in a better place?’” 

“You think more of me than that, Sergeant Barnes.” And it’s true--Peggy doesn’t talk about her past much, but Bucky knows enough. Dumb Americans like him, they’d gotten off easy when it came to the war. How many friends had Peggy lost to bombs? He can’t imagine it--not feeling safe in your own damn home, German bombs falling from the sky. Waking up the next day to discover entire streets gone. 

“I do,” Bucky says, and then shuts up. They don’t speak again until they’re back in the States, on solid ground. 

**

Brooklyn is no longer “home,” and even if it was, the SSR is based in a whole different borough. Peggy wants him to be an agent, so he’s an agent. A bitter, broken agent, but an agent nonetheless. 

Typing is hard when you only have one arm. Answering the phones is hard when you only have one arm. Shooting a gun is still easy when you only have one arm, but they won’t give him one. 

“You’re ignoring two damn good field agents,” he tells their superiors, and goddamn does he hate that word, “superior.” 

James Buchanan Barnes’s career as an SSR agent lasts about two months. It ends when he breaks his desk. Peggy is disappointed, but not surprised. 

That night he gets drunk and knocks on her door. Scares her roommate. “Y’ever think about getting married, Pegs?” he asks her, and she tells him it’s late, he ought to be getting home. 

“We should get married. I mean, who else’d want to marry us? A”-- _queer_ , his brain trips over the word before deciding to forget it altogether “fella missing an arm, and a dame that acts like a fella.”

“Shall I call you a cab, Mr. Barnes? You seem far too inebriated to walk home.” _Mr._ Barnes. Because he isn’t an agent anymore, is he? And what does he do now, with no Steve to look after and no one to shoot at? 

“You ever consider calling me by my first name?” he asks her later, climbing into the cab like a good little boy. 

“Good night, James,” she says, and closes the door. 

**

Gabe sends Bucky long, long letters from San Francisco twice a month. They’re nice and detailed, almost painfully so, and filled with questions Bucky doesn’t want to answer. 

_You know one of my buddies out here is from Brooklyn? Reminds me of you, but a lot less stupid. Originally a Georgia boy, like me, but his mother was a smart woman and moved the family up to Brooklyn before the depression hit. Worked as a doctor during the war, and guess what, Barnes? One of his superiors asked him if his blood was ‘a different color,’ the same exact question that Nazi asshole asked me. Guess idiots are idiots, no matter what side of the war they were on._

_Have you seen your family yet? My sister’s gotten so big, I thought she was gonna pick_ me _up and spin me around when I saw her at the train station. I remember you telling us stories about Becca, and socking Dum Dum when he asked if he’d have any chance with her, the rascal._

_We missed you at the funeral. Us Commandos, we’re planning on meeting up here in about a month. Would love to see you there. You’ve still got my telephone number, right?_

Sometimes Bucky considers writing back, but usually he just goes over the letter twice, checks for codes, keeps it in his pocket for a week, and then adds it to the stack. Being a Commando felt good, when he wasn’t half out of his mind with fear for Steve. But the other Howlers, they wouldn’t get it. Not the way Peggy does. 

**

They meet up twice a week, at a diner close to her work. They’ve got their regular table, their regular orders, and even their regular waitress, who Bucky flirts with out of habit but only ever seems to have eyes for Peggy. 

“Did Howard visit you?” she asks one week. 

“Stark? No, haven’t seen him. Isn’t he on the run now or something?” Bucky pays enough attention to the papers to know that. 

“I suppose so. I’ve seen the newsreel _twice_ already, have you?” Oh, so Peggy’s playing double agent for Howard. It was bound to happen sooner or later, the way Stark likes to get himself in hot water.  

Bucky shakes his head. “Haven’t had much time to go to the pictures. You wanna go see it together sometime?” _Do you need any help?_

“I’m fine on my own.” 

“Fine by me. But if there’s ever a--” shit, he’s rusty at this. No wonder the SSR fired him. “A particularly interesting movie, you’ll be sure to tell me about it, yeah?” 

“Of course. How’s your family?”

His family is fine. They’re happy that their son is alive, and still don’t really understand what happened to “sweet little Steve Rogers.” Becca wishes he would visit more often, just as his mother wishes he would go to temple with them. But then, they wished those things before the war, too.

Everyone they knew from the old country is dead. That’s why Bucky’s father doesn’t talk as much. 

“He won’t observe Yom Kippur anymore,” Bucky’s mother confesses one day, when Becca is busy with the dishes and Mr. Barnes has returned to his study. “Said God should be the one atoning, not him.”

“Give him time, Ma,” Bucky says, because he knows that this is what he’s supposed to say. “The war was hard on all of us.” 

“You could move back in. It’d make him happy. Becca, too. She misses you. We all do.” 

And that’s around the time Bucky usually makes his excuses and leaves. 

“They’re doing fine, Peggy. Got any jobs for me?”

Just then Angie, their waitress, comes by to take their order, a mere formality at this point. “Hey England. You decided to make this official yet, Tall, Dark, and Lonesome?”  


“He wishes he could, Angie,” Peggy smiles. “I’ll have the usual, please.”  


“Just a cup of coffee for me, thanks,” Bucky says. “Thinking of marriage makes me lose my appetite.” 

Angie laughs, doesn’t even bother to write down their orders. “Coming right up,” she says, and then Peggy and Bucky are on their own again. 

“What was it you’d asked me?” 

Bucky knows this is just a tactic, but repeats the question anyway. “Got any jobs for me?”  


“I thought you were working at one of the sugar refineries.” 

“You know what I mean.” It doesn’t happen often, but every once and a while Peggy will include him on one of her missions. Usually for Howard, but not always. 

Peggy sighs. “Then no. I’m a bit too busy, with all the pictures I’ve been going to see.” 

“And the fellas at the office? Still jerks?”  
  
“That’s not the word I’d use. But yes. Today at least I finally rid Sousa of the idea that he has to defend my honor.” 

Sousa. Also known as “the other cripple,” he’d come in just before Bucky’d left. “He’s sweet on you, you know.”  


Peggy doesn’t flinch, but that’s only because she’s had a lot of practice. “I know. Just like you know you’re being cruel, James.” 

“You can ask me something about my love life, if it’ll make you feel better.” 

“Have you managed to reconnect with any of your old sweethearts, from before the war?” 

Bucky bangs his hand on the table, laughs a little too loud. “Aww, that’s perfect, Carter! Right on the mark.” Angie’s walking over, looking worried, but he doesn’t care. “See, I didn’t have any sweethearts before the war. Not really. And if I had, they’d be dead by now, or married, or maybe a bit of both. But you knew that already.”

“Everything all right here?” Angie asks. 

“We’re fine,” Peggy says. Peggy is always fine. It’s Bucky that’s the broken one. “James just got a little overexcited, didn’t he?”  


“Been a long day, doll, you’ll have to forgive me,” Bucky says, and Angie pours him his coffee and he goes back to hiding how jealous he is. 

**

It’s sick, Bucky knows that. An ugly part of him, one that Steve never saw, thank God. Thank whoever.  

Because Peggy, she could’ve had everything. What Bucky wanted was just a twisted little pipe dream, a pitiful way to keep a dying man breathing. But what Peggy wanted, it’s beautiful. Her and Steve moving out to one of those little subdivisions, getting a television set. Having beautiful, blond-haired children with smart mouths and perfect grades. Of the two of them, Peggy was always the one who had more to lose. 

Because what did Bucky have? He had his death to look forward too, and then maybe Steve would name one of his and Peggy’s kids after him. James Rogers, a boy with brown hair and blue eyes and a strong jaw. A boy growing up with stories of his namesake, not realizing that the heroic soldier he so looked up to was actually just a mess of broken things on the inside. 

Looking at it that way, Bucky’s the lucky one. He’s been given an entire life, while Peggy’s been left alone, with no husband and no house, and not even any good work to take comfort in. But here she is, hair as immaculate as ever, calmly eating her meal and asking him about his life. Red lipstick stains her glass. 

She tells him to lay low for a while, asks that he not mention to anyone that he used to know Howard. “I’ll see you on Tuesday?” she asks him, and he nods. 

He knows his apartment will feel too empty tonight, so when he exits the diner he turns left instead of right. 

**

Bucky has become an expert on both fucking and being fucked by men who look like Steve. The one he’s got underneath him now is a bit too gangly to pass for Steve’s particular brand of skinny, but he’s got blue eyes and blond hair and makes the nicest noises when Bucky sucks on his hipbones. 

“No marks,” he gasps, and, well, doesn’t that take the fun out of things? 

If this was before the war, Bucky’d look up, all catlike grin, and ask “What, got somebody waiting for you at home?” But instead he just moves his mouth down a little lower, and the two of them don’t say anything else until it’s done with. 

His apartment is still too empty when he gets back, but at least now he doesn’t have to rub one out in the shower before bed and pity himself for saying Steve’s name when he comes. Every damn time. 

** 

The next time they meet he asks Peggy to come back to his place, because the diner is good for plenty of things, but right now neither of them wants to be overheard. 

She gives him the latest on Stark, minus the code this time, and then asks for his opinion.

“You know you can’t trust him, right?”  


“I didn’t realize you were one to believe the papers.”   
  
“I’m not. But we both know men like Stark--they’ve always got their own interests in mind. He likes you, sure, and you like him, no matter how much you may try to deny it. But liking ain’t the same as trusting.” 

Peggy nods. “You’re the only one left that I trust, James. Sad as that may be.” 

“Same here, Carter. Maybe it was always meant to be just us, you know?” But deep down, Bucky feels the lie of this. Peggy’s a survivor, not him. 

Bucky tells her everything. Starting at the beginning, of course, Steve being beat to a bloody pulp, Bucky saving him. Or maybe “save” isn’t the right word. 

Steve being sick, Bucky looking at his feverish, angelic face and thinking _Ohgodohgodohgod I love him_. Bucky keeping it down, Bucky taking Steve on double dates. Bucky going to war and praying his Stevie won’t follow. Bucky wondering if maybe this is his punishment for being sick like he is. 

“He loved you, too,” Peggy says, and Bucky realizes he’s sobbing. 

He shakes his head, sucks in breaths until he’s almost calm again. “We’re the only people left still in love with him. We gotta remember, okay?”

“Of course we will. Both of us.” Neither of them realizes that with this simple promise, Peggy is lying.   

Peggy will turn the SSR on its head one day, and then make it into something better. Something pure, like the old days, if that’s even possible now. Peggy will marry Daniel Sousa, or maybe she’ll finally give Angie a kiss, or maybe she’ll do both. Peggy will live, and it will be beautiful and violent and full, just like it ought to be. 

Bucky does not know this yet, but he is being watched. He is being watched, and in three months’ time he will be taken, because Arnim Zola might be dead, but Arnim Zola was not the only man who had a fondness for strapping soldiers to tables. Bucky will put up a fight, but it will not be enough. Men who want to die never fight hard enough. Peggy will look for him for a while, but James Buchanan Barnes was always meant to be a ghost story. 

They will put him in the chair and he will think _This is the last time I’m gonna be in love with Steve_ , and it might not make much sense in his head (his head of broken glass and bullets, his head of sparks and wires) but his heart will burn with the truth of it.

Bucky will forget his own name, and, eventually, he will forget Steve’s, too. That’s the way it was always meant to be.  

** 

They try it, once. On a mission for Stark, in a romantically lit (just dark enough) hotel room. Her hands finding his shoulders. His mouth tasting lipstick for the first time in years.  

He hesitates before pulling away, and even then stays close, breathes her in. “Who were you thinking of?”

“Him,” she says. “Who were you thinking of?”  


“Him,” Bucky doesn’t say. Always him. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm like 89% sure this is gonna have a sequel??? Until then I'm on [**tumblr.**](http://www.bimarvel.tumblr.com)


End file.
